Abstract: There is an expression, in recent Marvel superhero films, of a social anxiety about genetic science that, in part, replaces the social anxieties about nuclear weapons that can be detected in the comic books on which these films are based (Rutherford). Much of the analysis of superhero comics – and the films on which they are based – has focussed its attention on the anxieties contained within them about gender, sexuality, race, politics, and the nation. Surprisingly little direct critique is applied to the most obvious point of difference within those texts, namely the acquisition, display, and use of extra-ordinary abilities. These superhero films represent some of the ways that audiences come to understand genetics. I am interested in this essay in considering how the representation of genetic mutation, as an error in a bio-chemical code, is a key narrative device. Moreover, mutation is central to the way the films explore the social exclusion of characters who acquire super-abilities. My contention is that, in these Marvel comic films, extra-ordinary ability, and the anxieties expressed about those abilities, parallels some of the social and cultural beliefs about the disabled body. The impaired body thus becomes a larger trope for any deviation from the “normal” body and gives rise to the anxieties about deviation and deviance explored in these films. Impairment and illness have historically been represented as either a blessing or a curse – the source of revelation and discovery, or the site of ignominy. As Western culture developed, the confluence of Greek and Judeo-Christian stories about original sin and inherited punishment for parental digression resulted in the entrenchment of beliefs about bent and broken bodies as the locus of moral questions (and answers) about the abilities and use of the human body (Sontag 47). I want to explore, firstly, in the film adaptations of the Marvel comics X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, and The Hulk, the representation of changes to the body as the effect of invisible bio-chemical states and processes. It has been impossible to see DNA, whether with the human eye or with technical aid; the science of genetics is largely based on inference from other observations. In these superhero films, the graphic display of DNA and genetic restructuring is strikingly large. This overemphasis suggests both that the genetic is a key narrative impetus of the films and that there is something uncertain or disturbing about genetic science. One such concern about genetic science is identifying the sources of oppression that might underlie the, at times understandable, desire to eliminate disease and congenital defect through changes to the genetic code or elimination of genetic error. As Adrienne Asch states, this urge to eliminate disease and impairment is problematic: Why should it be acceptable to avoid some characteristics and not others? How can the society make lists of acceptable and unacceptable tests and still maintain that only disabling traits, and not people who live with those traits, are to be avoided? (339) Asch’s questioning ends with the return to the moral concerns that have always circulated around the body, and in particular a body that deviates from a norm. The maxim “hate the sin, not the sinner” is replaced by “eradicate the impairment, not the impaired”: it is some kind of lack of effort or resourcefulness on the part of the impaired that is detectable in the presence of the impairment. This replacement of sin by science is yet another example of the trace of the body as the site of moral arguments. As Bryan Turner argues, categories of disease, and by association impairment, are intrinsic to the political discourse of Western societies about otherness and exclusion (Turner 216). It is not surprising then, that characters that experience physical changes caused by genetic mutation may take on for themselves the social shame that is part of the exclusion process. As genetic science has increasingly infiltrated the popular imagination and thus finds expression in cinema, so too has this concern of shame and guilt become key to the narrative tension of films that link changes in the genetic code to the acquisition of super-ability. In the X-Men franchise, the young female character Rogue (Anna Paquin), acquires the ability to absorb another’s life force (and abilities), and she seeks to have her genetic code resequenced in order to be able to touch others, and thus by implication have a “normal” life. In X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003), Rogue’s boyfriend, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who has been largely excluded from her touch, returns home with other mutants. After having hidden his mutant abilities from his family, he finally confesses to them the truth about himself. His shocked mother turns to him and asks: “Have you tried not being a mutant?” Whilst this moment has been read as an expression of anxiety about homosexuality (“Pop Culture: Out Is In”; Vary), it also marks a wider social concern about otherness, including disability, and its attendant social exclusion. Moreover, this moment reasserts the paradigm of effort that underlies anxieties about deviations from the norm: Iceman could have been normal if only he had tried harder, had a different girlfriend, remained at home, sought more knowledge, or had better counsel. Science, and more specifically genetic science, is suggested in many of these films as the site of bad counsel. The narratives of these superhero stories, almost without exception, begin or hinge on some kind of mistake by scientists – the escaped spider, the accident in the laboratory, the experiment that gets out of control. The classic image of the mad scientist or Doctor Frankenstein type, locked away in his laboratory is reflected in the various scenes in all these films, in which the scientists are separated from wider society. In Fantastic 4 (Tim Story, 2005), the villain, Dr Von Doom (Julian McMahon), is located at the top of a large multi-story building, as too are the heroes. Their separation from the rest of society is made even more dramatic by placing the site of their exposure to cosmic radiation, the source of the genetic mutation, in a space station that is empty of anyone else except the five main characters whose bodies will be altered. In Spiderman (Sam Raimi, 2002), the villain is a scientist whose experiments are kept secret by the military, emphasising the danger inherent in his work. The mad-scientist imagery dominates the representation of Bruce Bannor’s father in Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003), whose experiments have altered his genetic code, and that alteration in genetic structure has subsequently been passed onto his son. The Fantastic 4 storyline returns several times to the link between genetic mutation and the exposure to cosmic radiation. Indeed, it is made explicit that human existence – and by implication the human body and abilities – is predicated on this cosmic radiation as the source of transformations that formed the human genetic code. The science of early biology thus posits this cosmic radiation as the source of what is “normal,” and it is this appeal to the cosmos – derived from the Greek kosmos meaning “order” – that provides, in part, the basis on which to value the current human genetic code. This link to the cosmic is also made in the opening sequence of X-Men in which the following voice-over is heard as we see a ball of light form. This light show is both a reminder of the Big Bang (the supposed beginning of the universe which unleased vast amounts of radiation) and the intertwining of chromosomes seen inside biological nuclei: Mutation, it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single celled organism to the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia evolution leaps forward. Whilst mutation may be key to human evolution and the basis for the dramatic narratives of these superhero films, it is also the source of social anxiety. Mutation, whilst derived from the Latin for “change,” has come to take on the connotation of an error or mistake. Richard Dawkins, in his celebrated book The Selfish Gene, compares mutation to “an error corresponding to a single misprinted letter in a book” (31). The language of science is intended to be without the moral overtones that such words as “error” and “misprint” attract. Nevertheless, in the films under consideration, the negative connotations of mutation as error or mistake, are, therefore, the source of the many narrative crises as characters seek to rid themselves of their abilities. Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), the villain of Spiderman, is spurred on by his belief that human beings have not ac hieved their potential, and the implication here is that the presence of physical weakness, illness, and impairment is the supporting evidence. The desire to return the bodies of these superheroes to a “normal” state is best expressed in_ Hulk_, when Banner’s father says: “So you wanna know what’s wrong with him. So you can fix him, cure him, change him.” The link between a mistake in the genetic code and the disablement of the these characters is made explicit when Banner demands from his father an explanation for his transformation into the Hulk – the genetic change is explicitly named a deformity. These films all gesture towards the key question of just what is the normal human genetic code, particularly given the way mutation, as error, is a fundamental tenet in the formation of that code. The films’ focus on extra-ordinary ability can be taken as a sign of the extent of the anxiety about what we might consider normal. Normal is represented, in part, by the supporting characters, named and unnamed, and the narrative turns towards rehabilitating the altered bodies of the main characters. The narratives of social exclusion caused by such radical deviations from the normal human body suggest the lack of a script or language for being able to talk about deviation, except in terms of disability. In Spiderman, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is doubly excluded in the narrative. Beginning as a classic weedy, glasses-wearing, nerdy individual, unable to “get the girl,” he is exposed to numerous acts of humiliation at the commencement of the film. On being bitten by a genetically altered spider, he acquires its speed and agility, and in a moment of “revenge” he confronts one of his tormentors. His super-ability marks him as a social outcast; his tormentors mock him saying “You are a freak” – the emphasis in speech implying that Parker has never left a freakish mode. The film emphasises the physical transformation that occurs after Parker is bitten, by showing his emaciated (and ill) body then cutting to a graphic depiction of genes being spliced into Parker’s DNA. Finally revealing his newly formed, muscular body, the framing provides the visual cues as to the verbal alignment of these bodies – the extraordinary and the impaired bodies are both sources of social disablement. The extreme transformation that occurs to Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), in Fantastic 4, can be read as a disability, buying into the long history of the disabled body as freak, and is reinforced by his being named “The Thing.” Socially, facial disfigurement may be regarded as one of the most isolating impairments; for example, films such as The Man without a Face (Mel Gibson, 1993) explicitly explore this theme. As the only character with a pre-existing relationship, Grimm’s social exclusion is reinforced by the rejection of his girlfriend when she sees his face. The isolation in naming Ben Grimm as “The Thing” is also expressed in the naming of Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) alter ego “Hulk.” They are grossly enlarged bodies that are seen as grotesque mutations of the “normal” human body – not human, but “thing-like.” The theme of social exclusion is played alongside the idea that those with extra-ordinary ability are also emblematic of the evolutionary dominance of a superior species of which science is an example of human dominance. The Human Genome Project, begun in 1990, and completed in 2003, was in many ways the culmination of a century and a half of work in biochemistry, announcing that science had now completely mapped the human genome: that is, provided the complete sequence of genes on each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells. The announcement of the completed sequencing of the human genome led to, what may be more broadly called, “genomania” in the international press (Lombardo 193). But arguably also, the continued announcements throughout the life of the Project maintained interest in, and raised significant social, legal, and ethical questions about genetics and its use and abuse. I suggest that in these superhero films, whose narratives centre on genetic mutation, that the social exclusion of the characters is based in part on fears about genetics as the source of disability. In these films deviation becomes deviance. It is not my intention to reduce the important political aims of the disability movement by equating the acquisition of super-ability and physical impairment. Rather, I suggest that in the expression of the extraordinary in terms of the genetic within the films, we can detect wider social anxieties about genetic science, particularly as the representations of that science focus the audience’s attention on mutation of the genome. An earlier film, not concerned with superheroes but with the perfectibility of the human body, might prove useful here. Gattaca (Andrew Nicol, 1997), which explores the slippery moral slope of basing the value of the human body in genetic terms (the letters of the title recall the chemicals that structure DNA, abbreviated to G, A, T, C), is a powerful tale of the social consequences of the primacy of genetic perfectibility and reflects the social and ethical issues raised by the Human Genome Project. In a coda to the film, that was not included in the theatrical release, we read: We have now evolved to the point where we can direct our own evolution. Had we acquired this knowledge sooner, the following people may never have been born. The screen then reveals a list of significant people who were either born with or acquired physical or psychological impairments: for example, Abraham Lincoln/Marfan Syndrome, Jackie Joyner-Kersee/Asthma, Emily Dickinson/Manic Depression. The audience is then given the stark reminder of the message of the film: “Of course the other birth that may never have taken place is your own.” The social order of Gattaca is based on “genoism” – discrimination based on one’s genetic profile – which forces characters to either alter or hide their genetic code in order to gain social and economic benefit. The film is an example of what the editors of the special issue of the Florida State University Law Journal on genetics and disability note: how we look at genetic conditions and their relationship to health and disability, or to notions of “normalcy” and “deviance,” is not strictly or even primarily a legal matter. Instead, the issues raised in this context involve ethical considerations and require an understanding of the social contexts in which those issues appear. (Crossley and Shepherd xi) Implicit in these commentators’ concern is the way an ideal body is assumed as the basis from which a deviation in form or ability is measured. These superhero films demonstrate that, in order to talk about super-ability as a deviation from a normal body, they rely on disability scripts as the language of deviation. Scholars in disability studies have identified a variety of ways of talking about disability. The medical model associates impairment or illness with a medical tragedy, something that must be cured. In medical terms an error is any deviation from the norm that needs to be rectified by medical intervention. By contrast, in the social constructivist model, the source of disablement is environmental, political, cultural, or economic factors. Proponents of the social model do not regard impairment as equal to inability (Karpf 80) and argue that the discourses of disability are “inevitably informed by normative beliefs about what it is proper for people’s bodies and minds to be like” (Cumberbatch and Negrine 5). Deviations from the normal body are classification errors, mistakes in social categorisation. In these films aspects of both the medical tragedy and social construction of disability can be detected. These films come at a time when disability remains a site of social and political debate. The return to these superheroes, and their experiences of exclusion, in recent films is an indicator of social anxiety about the functionality of the human body. And as the sc ience of genetics gains increasing public representation, the idea of ability – and disability – that is, what is regarded as “proper” for bodies and minds, is increasingly related to how we regard the genetic code. As the twenty first century began, new insights into the genetic origins of disease and congenital impairments offered the possibility that the previous uncertainty about the provenance of these illnesses and impairments may be eliminated. But new uncertainties have arisen around the value of human bodies in terms of ability and function. This essay has explored the way representations of extra-ordinary ability, as a mutation of the genetic code, trace some of the experiences of disablement. A study of these superhero films suggests that the popular dissemination of genetics has not resulted in an understanding of ability and form as purely bio-chemical, but that thinking about the body as a bio-chemical code occurs within already present moral discourses of the body’s value. References Asch, Adrienne. “Disability Equality and Prenatal Testing: Contradictory or Compatible?” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 315-42. Crossley, Mary, and Lois Shepherd. “Genes and Disability: Questions at the Crossroads.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): xi-xxiii. Cumberbatch, Guy, and Ralph Negrine. Images of Disability on Television. London: Routledge, 1992. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Karpf, A. “Crippling Images.” Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. Eds. A. Pointon and C. Davies. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 79-83. Lombardo, Paul A. “Taking Eugenics Seriously: Three Generations Of ??? Are Enough.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 191-218. “Pop Culture: Out Is In.” Contemporary Sexuality 37.7 (2003): 9. Rutherford, Adam. “Return of the Mutants.” Nature 423.6936 (2003): 119. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. London: Penguin, 1988. Turner, Bryan S. Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge, 1992. Vary, Adam B. “Mutant Is the New Gay.” Advocate 23 May 2006: 44-45. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mantle, Martin. "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ? 〉 〈 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php 〉 . APA Style Mantle, M. (Oct. 2007) "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ? 〉 from 〈 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php 〉 .

Abstract: "I write for a species that does not yet exist." -- Nietzsche (958) III. Note on Self-Organisation and Selectionism According to your mainstream brand neo-Darwinian biologist, natural selection is the stuff of which evolution is made, the First Principle of life. There is nothing in the natural world which cannot be explained by random mutations within the genome and subsequent selection of the fittest form by the natural environment. Beyond the constraints set by the period of waiting for mutations to occur and external conditions, there are no limits to this system, and an organism forms from scratch to a furry crawling thing in a gradual process reliant on external factors. Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile two theories which are quite simply at odds with one another: Mendelian genetics, which claims that organisms do not change with time, and Darwinism, which claims that they do. This is usually done in a mathematical way, with nat ural selection as the linchpin of some tight equations. There can be no internal feedback from the body (phenotype) to the genes (genotype). There is no self-organising adaptive order: all emerges from the process of selection as a carefully articulated tree diagram, and adapts over eons. As the Darwinian critic Arthur Koestler pointed out, natural selection is hence the only process found in nature which is devoid of feedback. Neo-Darwinian theory is both unfalsifiable and all-pervasive; it is easy to forget that it is a theory which has not yet been proven beyond doubt by paleontological fact, and that Darwin himself suggested there may be processes other than natural selection at work in the unfolding of life. There are a couple of rogue biologists and a-life crazies, however, that don't believe the Selectionist hype. They are not suggesting that natural selection is a dud theory, but simply that there might be other factors involved, and that the really interesting questions don't just concern life as a Darwinian competition between furry, crawling things, but the interplay between structure and chaos at the basic levels of the system which might give rise to it. Biologists such as Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman take issue with this, claiming that an understanding of life should begin at a more fundamental level than tree diagrams and zoology -- molecular biology, biochemistry, complexity theory. This is the 'language' of life: the way that structure spontaneously emerges from chaos. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould looked at the fossil record a few years back and decided that there is no proof that one species turns into another slowly: the mathematics of the Neo-Darwinists relied upon the idea that species took hundreds of millions of years to evolve eyes and ears and legs and wings, branching off into other species in the manner of a tree diagram over billions of years. What Eldredge and Gould found was that species seem to spontaneously emerge fully formed: there is minimal variation going on. A species emerges rapidly, it lasts for a time (often a short time), and then it dies off. The in-between period, the period of mutation and selectionism, is largely unaccounted for by the fossil record, especially considering the importance of such transitory phases to the neo-Darwinists. There are many 'missing links' in the record. For over twenty years, Stuart Kauffman has been going on about what we might call a Second Principle in evolutionary biology: self-organisation. He argues that because natural selection alone is not enough to explain the relatively short timescale on which life arose, some other ordering principle is necessary. He locates this, as Katherine Hayles observes, in the ability of complex systems to self-organise (241). A self-organising system involves the heresy of internal feedback and internally-produced constraints. Living creatures would converge upon certain forms as much as diverge from them due to the influence of mutations caused by cosmic rays, wild chance and external factors. Creatures will not just evolve over billions of years due to selection, but will appear in a more concerted and spontaneous manner. Systems will seek their own order. The heresy in this (as far as neo-Darwinians are concerned, but not all evolutionary biologists) is located in the fact that such enabling constraints emerge from within the system itself. Consequently, natural selection is not the only force at work in evolution. The system is its own material of expression, and can generate its own tendencies and limits. Kauffman calls this process antichaos, or "order for free" (335). One can sense that such a theory would be objectionable to biologists: there is nothing distinctively biological about this explanation, which in fact borrows from physics and complexity theory, and it explores living organisms, chemical compositions and non-biological aggregates alike as systems, privileging no particular machine. A 'complex system', in particular, can be anything from the stockmarket to a flock of birds. XI. Sonicform We might note here a similarity with virtual artist Keith Nettos's Java-based sound system, Sonicform, whose evolving sound structures can be obtained from the artist on request 〈 lucidweave@usa.net 〉 : the divide between living and non-living is not the issue. As Keith puts it, "it's an echo of that Descartian dichotomy between mind and matter. Do such distinctions help us to know ourselves better? I'm not sure that they do". Sonicform is more a world of Newtonian discovery than biblical creation. Self-organisation works on a generative systemic level, and is a prerequisite more so than a defining quality of life or evolution; it is necessary but not sufficient to characterise an organic system. The computer is the perfect environment in which to explore the confusion and commonalities between animate and inanimate systems, and in that confusion, reveal something of the processes underlying the actual generation of self and order in the universe. Information-processing, and life, require a certain type of complexity. The system must be dynamic, yet allow for novel patterns. The computer emphasises the logic as well as the mechanics of life, which are then honed and honoured by the more familiar conception of natural selection. IV. Self-organisation is the natural consequence of simple components (cells, units of sound, air molecules, genes) interacting via equally simple rules. Patterns and forms emerge from the collective raucous, and these forms give rise to other forms. The components in such a system are bimbos: they have no idea what is going on in the greater body, and don't care. In other words, a complex system emerges from lots of small but well-chosen components interacting in a rule-governed way, developing a larger behaviour or pattern which cannot be predicted or divined from these constituent parts. Random mutation and selection will act upon such a system -- this is how Selectionism fits in: forms will not just evolve from scratch via selection, but will spontaneously emerge from within the system, working in conjunction with the First Principle. IV. Sonicform In the Sonicform system, the components are 'sound fragments', the samples attached to the images in the top left-hand corner of the screen at startup, and also the people seated at terminals who interact with these fragments. Although it might seem to be stretching the concept of systemic components to include the user population, the fact that the emerging pattern is dependent on these users to evolve renders them part of the system. The organisation of a machine has less to do with its materiality than with the inter-relations of its components. The rules in Sonicform are the 'sound controllers' located on the right-hand side of the screen, containing basic instructions such as "play sound", "loop sound" and "stop sound" that control the sound fragments and consequently limit the structure of the emerging acoustic pattern. Because Sonicform is linked via the Net to 'sonicserver' and consequently the multiple versions of itself which are being executed at any point in time, any changes that a user makes (e.g. attraction towards a particular kind of sound) are detected by sonicserver and fed back into a primary chain structure. This is the formative basis of Sonicform's 'evolution': a selection of internal behavioural constraints generated by its constituent parts. The heresy in this is the implication that both biological and technical systems are capable of self-organisation and evolution, that both are constellations of universes which are capable of autonomy and complexity (and 'life' as a certain form of complexity). This is not anti-humanist. It's not even post-humanist. Ideology is a human concept which is brought to bear on technology. We're talking a different register altogether. Technical machines, organic machines, conceptual machines: each will beget the other, each will inscribe its own pattern on the process, each will redefine the limits of such connections. VII. The Death of Metaphor: All That Consists Is Real 'Machinic heterogenesis', a term used by Felix Guattari in his book Chaosmosis, is a mode of being and production that draws on complexity theory and the work of Francisco Varela (a biologist interested in self-organisation in immune networks) and Kauffman. Guattari extends the concept of self-organisation to create a pragmatic philosophy. Machinic heterogenesis is a term to describe the way that the machines which populate the universe connect with each other, mutually affect each other, exchange segments and then bifurcate into new machines. Collective existential mutation. When we sit at a computer screen, we are connected with the computer's universes of reference through the circuits of sight, the play of fingers across the keyboard, the conceptual and logical limits of the exchange laid down by both parties. There is a certain synchrony going on across the zone of intersection and compromise to the limits of this exchange. In other words, the limits of the medium define the exchange and what we are becoming as we connect with it. What is the 'ness' of the computer medium, and what are the possible universes of exchange which extend from this? Sonicform explores this exchange through sound, and through a system which explicitly invites us to be a part of an evolving structure. The use of complexity theory and evolution in Sonicform makes explicit the rethinking of machines which we have been doing here in general: machines speak to machines before they speak to Man, and the ontological domains that they reveal and secrete tend towards pattern in an innate way, determined by the mode of aggregation of their constituent parts. Sonicform rethinks technology in terms of evolutionary, collective entities. And this rethinking allows for the particular qualities of the medium itself, its own characteristics, its own unique interpretations of our model of evolution, to express themselves. Here I might note something: evolution cannot be naturalised and reified as an entity independent of the conceptual, technical and scientific machinery of its production. In the eagerness to import biological models to the computer in a-life, we sometimes forget that from its very origins, the human species has been constituted by technical evolution, and that it is the mediation afforded by technics which makes "it impossible simply to describe evolution in terms of a self-contained, or monadic, subject that passively 'adapts' to an object-like environment" (Pearson 4). Similarly, we have produced our various models of evolution by analysing the 'natural environment' through the mediation of technology. Technology has always enjoyed more than just the position of a neutral tool to locate and test Nature, and has its own unique limits and qualities to contribute to anything we produce with it. So this will be the beginning of our rethinking. Constellations of universes colliding, machines exchanging particularities, components that retain their autonomy and yet can collect and self-organise into complex systems, even life. "The ideas that we have been devoting space to here -- instability, fluctuation, complex systems -- diffuse into the social sciences", in the words of Ilya Prigogine (312). If we can create an evolving complex system on the screen which we ourselves are components of, we tend to rethink the interface between nature and technology. What does it say about the "reference point" of the natural world when creatures whose entire function consists of weird acoustic dances across computer circuitry begin to self-replicate and exhibit the signs of open-ended evolution, resulting in formations which no longer have analogues in the 'natural' world? I'd like to hesitate a start here. Biology is its own material of semiotic expression. Techné is its own material of semiotic expression. To address the interface between nature and technology, we need a philosophy of cells, flocks, patterns, components, motors, and elements. We need a philosophy that will create an interference pattern across the zone of intersection. References Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Kauffman, Stuart. "Order For Free." The Third Culture. Ed. Brockman. New York: Touchstone Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1968. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. London: Bantam Books, 1984. Pearson, Keith Ansell. Viroid Life. London: Routledge, 1997. This work is part of the Australian Network for Art and Technology's Deep Immersion: Creative Collaborations project, funded by the AFC. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php 〉 . Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sonic.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1999) Machinic heterogenesis and evolution: collected notes on sound, machines and Sonicform. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. Since we've just had that time at the end of a decade (not to mention the end of the century, as well as the Christian calendar "millennium"), when all the pundits came out to review where we had been and forecast where we are going, we should have expected a profundity of future-casting. But neither the familiar prognostications of the coming apocalypse spewing forth from the Religious Right, nor the usual statistical projections made by "experts" on such things as population growth, world politics, economic cycles, new products and shifting job markets, etc. will provide any help in reading the map we have already drawn up, or translating the directional signs. The future is now. It occupies the same domain as the past. Both are inhabitants of the present moment. History, memory, desire, imagination, the creative instinct, and the impetus to act, unfold and are realised as the future becomes the present. We cannot help but tinker with the universe. The future is what we make it and there are an infinite number of possible timelines. Or maybe not. It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. The Human Genome Project1 is about to decode our physiology. We are preparing for the next evolution of the species. The battle between the cyberneticists and the geneticists for a new and improved version of homo sapiens version 3.0 has just begun. The question of where it will lead is open-ended. Will the insatiable quest for self-improvement lead to enlightenment -- a world with less suffering, hunger, disease, violence, and greed? Or, will we be the makers of our own extinction, and end up as a version of Star Trek's Borg -- the ultimate consumers, assimilating automatons devouring everything they encounter, and utterly devoid of the qualities that make us human? As an example of a hypothetical biological and social future the Borg are an interesting model -- a synthesis of a utopian socialist dream and the capitalist imperative of acquisition in the information age. As organic/cybernetic humanoid machines with one unified mind, equal and undifferentiated, untroubled by ego or id, individual ambitions, desires or passions, loneliness, alienation, or imagination they are the ultimate homogeneous collective. At the same time they are both the perfect corporate entity -- masters of the merger, the hostile takeover ("resistance is futile"), and a mindless population programmed to consume and continually upgrade each and every new technology and product. But the Borg don't invent; they only appropriate. Postmodern androids to the core! And we are presently very busy making new discoveries, creating and inventing, and transforming theories into things which tell us not only what is possible, but probable. One of the determining factors in the course of our future is whether or not our belief in technology over other values turns us into the puppets instead of the puppeteers, slaves to masters of our own invention -- be it HAL, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, or the Terminator. Let us consider some possible future scenarios, based not on fiction, but on what already exists, or is about to do so. Facts No one now disputes that the transformation of stem cells into new body parts, cloning technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and microchip replacements not only could, but will dramatically change medicine and extend life in the coming century. In strictly medical terms, the implementation of all these technologies will bring about extraordinary relief of both the physical and psychological pain and suffering caused by debilitating, disabling, or disfiguring disease or injuries, not to mention the lives saved, and the genetic diseases prevented. Current research has found that not only stem cells taken from human embryos or fetuses could be directed to grow replacements for ailing hearts, livers or other organs, but that some stem cells taken from adult tissue could be converted into other types of cells -- brain cells becoming blood cells, or bone marrow becoming liver. The application of this technology is dazzling -- transformative biology, and it is just over the horizon2. Recently, scientists announced the creation of the first artificial cornea made from human cells. It could help restore the sight of those with certain kinds of eye damage. At the same time cybernetics is playing an equally important part. In development is a mini-computer that essentially takes over damaged visual functions and projects them onto a screen. One model expected to be ready for market within three years is a version of Geordie's visor in Star Trek: Next Generation. Another is a microchip that is inserted behind the eye3. In his newest book Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, University of Southern California electrical engineering professor Bart Kosco, author of Fuzzy Thinking (1993), projects his theories onto everything from smart machines, the politics of genomes (who owns you, your genetic material, that is) and the environment (who owns the sea, or for that matter the air) to the problem of human mortality. Kosco foresees the day when we may be able to download our brains onto a microchip, thus achieving digital immortality via a gradual (fuzzy) transformation in which the brain's "meat" is replaced piece by piece with nanochips that work ever faster, better, and more creatively than old-fashioned neurons and synapses. The use of microchips to repair or replace damaged cells or portions of the brain is one thing, but as a means to greatly increase mental capacity, and gain everlasting life by "leaving your gray matter pickled in a jar" in favour of a computer in your skull is another. Would you still be you? While researchers have currently found new molecules in the brain that play a role in creating memories and learning, it does not ensure wisdom in how we put our knowledge to work. That great benefits await us, in the prevention and treatment of disease and the disintegration due to aging, is not in dispute. Nor is the enhanced capacity of a healthier society in body and mind. What constitutes the latter is. We are still left with ethical questions about the uses of technology, and spiritual and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. What are the political and social ramifications of biotechnology? British television playwright Dennis Potter's last work Cold Lazarus represents the ethical dilemmas of a future world capable of robbing a man's soul against his will. Scientists, whose funding is controlled by one or another governing media megalomaniac, seek to experience the 20th century through the genuine memories of the late Daniel Feeld, whose frozen head they have obtained. Their biochemical experiments are no less despicable than the CEO who wants to broadcast Feeld's "consciousness" worldwide twenty-four hours a day. Political opposition exists only in the form of a clandestine "terrorist" organization known as R.O.N. (Reality Or Nothing). If we were to base our forecasts on the patterns of history, just such a techno-fascist corporate future awaits us. If we are to judge by the dominant values of the present, the economic priorities of the marketplace will overpower the dissenting voices, placing not only the natural environment at risk, but our social environment as well. What will such a society do about the underclasses when smart machines have taken over their work, and they haven't the means to buy our goods, only consume precious resources; that is, when they are no longer "necessary" to the economic system. Will they be technologically phased out or upgraded? Fast Forward Let's not jump too far ahead. Maybe just to 2050. You can grow your own body part replacements, not just internal organs, but muscle, nerve tissue, skin. You can rejuvenate. Living to 120 or longer will not be unusual. The manufacture of body parts will be a big biotech business. Invest now! But will this technology be available to anyone and everyone, or only those who can afford it? Will we have parts kept in cold storage ready and waiting? Organs grown from extractions of our own foetal tissue perhaps. If it is a right not a privilege, how will our society deal with the problems of overpopulation? Will only those over a certain age -- say 80 -- who are viewed as "contributing" or "productive" members of society be eligible for new organs? Or will your lifestyle and health habits be a factor? No new livers for recalcitrant unreformed alcoholics? Will there be a ranking system of qualifications? Who will decide what they will be? Never mind arms and drugs. Consider this black market in the making! Subterranean high-tech operating rooms, organ factories, contraband stem cells, DNA, "smart" nanochips. Fast Forward And what about those microchips for brain functions? Not just for disease but for self-improvement. You might be able to improve your personality the way you can have a face-lift or breast implants. Then again, microchips could replace both pharmacology and psychotherapy in the treatment of mental disease, or merely antisocial or criminally aberrant behaviour, a new form of rehabilitation. As for sheer brain power, there would be no end to your capacity to absorb information, memorize and catalogue it, or to calculate stock market transactions. And just think of the lawsuits bound to jam up the courts, should someone have the misfortune to get a faulty chip, or even one that doesn't live up to expectations. Advertising is bound to promise you the answer to your dreams. The insertion of these parts by choice is one thing, but suppose it is forced on you by a government or a corporation. Or even by a parent while you are too young to fight back, the ones who want their offspring to be a math genius, Olympic athlete, or musical prodigy. Then again, genetic engineering may take care of some of that. Babies to order. By the end of this century you might not even have to have one the old messy way. Or you might not even be allowed to. Your genetically selected child might be grown in a computer-controlled organic womb. No more unwanted pregnancies. No more crack babies, or Downs Syndrome, or spina bifida4. We've been messing around for quite some time with a lot of things we don't know or haven't considered the consequences of in terms of the long term ecological balance of life and all its interdependent systems: cross-species genetic implants in plants and animals; plants altered to kill insects that are food for another creature on the food chain. And so on up the ladder: tomatoes that only look like tomatoes, but aren't really tomatoes any more. A perfect example of surface over substance. While we are so sure of our technological mastery, the actual "apocalypse" may well be of our own making when the forces of nature wreak havoc and pay us back for our abuses and arrogance. Or perhaps it will be nature's way of resetting the balance of things by greatly reducing the human population. Or it just might turn out this way. The newly evolved, genetically and cybernetically enhanced humanoids 3.0 survive and adapt (to 3.5), while the great mass of old humans become an endangered species like the Siberian tiger. Present Tense If you think this is all just science fiction, consider this. Already a number of young men in Silicon Valley or at M.I.T. walk around all day every day with one eye and ear always focused on the little headset computer screen that keeps them perpetually "on-line", plugged in. Do they look a little like the Borg? Well yes. Or, think about this. About a year ago a bill came up in the California state legislature proposing that a microchip be inserted in all newborn infants, like the ones you can put in your dog so you can track her if she gets lost or stolen. Same principle with babies. The bill was defeated. But very soon we will all be locatable, "on-line". No chance of disappearing in the 21st century when the wilderness is about to become another "theme" park, and when, at this very moment, you can be traced every time you use a plastic card or make a phone call. What a scary thought for dissidents, revolutionaries, battered women, or anyone who just wants to "get away from it all". In the 21st century, Huxley's "savages" would have as hard a time surviving or avoiding capture as a wolf in Arizona. How will our civil rights, our human rights be affected at the present rate of invasion into our privacy. Is your body your own? And what about your mind? What exactly will the "right to your life" mean? Will "smart" machines have that right? How will we define a sentient being? And so here we are. The 21st century is all mapped out. Maps can be misread. Maps can be wrong. The place that has been charted can be changed. By a force of nature, or an act of will. Or better still, by an act of conscience or consciousness, for it is an energy force with transformative powers. We could become better in our hearts and souls. We could use our knowledge with grace. Now go out and draw a new map(s). Happy New Century! Footnotes Huge advances in genomics, the science of deciphering the basic genetic pattern of life, were made in 1999, including the complete gene sequence for three microbes, a third of the base pairs in human DNA, along with one complete chromosome, number 22, and a rough draft of the entire human genome is expected by March 2000. For more about the Human Genome Project check out the following Website: http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/ and all its links. Also http://www.turbulence.org/ for Bionet :: Recombinant by Eugene Thacker, an artist's "attempt to assemble a body of discourse surrounding contemporary molecular genetics and biotechnology at the end of the millenium". Science journal editor Floyd E. Bloom optimistically predicts that "although much remains to be done to convert today's results into tomorrow's treatments and tools, the likelihood of success seems high". Researchers in this field are: May Griffith, Research Scientist, University of Ottowa Eye Institute, Professor, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario Gislin Dagnelie, Researcher, Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center, Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Dr. Thomas Friberg, Professor, Ophthalmology, Chairman, Department of Ophthalmology, Director of Retina and Vitreous Service, The Eye and Ear Institute of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Dr. Terry Ernest, Professor, Chairman, Ophthalmology and Visual Science, University of Chicago Medical Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois A congenital cleft of the vertebral column with hernial protrusion of the meninges (membranes that envelop the brain and spinal cord). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jacki Apple. "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php 〉 . Chicago style: Jacki Apple, "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Jacki Apple. (2000) Some speculation on the future of the body and soul. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video  (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof).  Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring.  There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video.  As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities.  It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich  presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages.  The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner).  In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier).  In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009.  The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18.  Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment.  Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications.  Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan?  Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs?  Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue?  How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue?  As an alternative to signing?  Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels.  This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”.  The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux.  The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films).  The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive.  While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde).  Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people.  During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making.  In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past.  The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web.  There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives.  These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined.  It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7).   The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’.  As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating.  Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse.  This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527).  In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical").  The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however.  Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12).  They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents.  They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place.  They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11).  As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication.       Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. 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Abstract: Introduction According to its proponents and developers, we will soon be consuming animal flesh that has been manufactured outside of an animal’s body using a suite of technologies and processes that fall under the broad banner of biofabrication. This flesh, termed “clean meat” by proponents, is expected to be safer, healthier, victimless and far more environmentally benign than flesh derived from an animal’s body within intensive animal agriculture systems. As the Good Food Institute, an established non-governmental body for reducing meat consumption through the creation of new products, claims:Clean meat is one breakthrough solution to the problems associated with raising animals for food. Clean meat is created by growing meat outside of an animal from a small cell sample, eliminating the need for factory farming and slaughter.This kind of narrative has dominated media and scholarship on the new material, which this article refers to as biofabricated animal material (see, e.g., Dilworth and McGregor; Driessen and Korthals; O’Riordan et al.). Recently, however, a counter-narrative about the material has entered key discursive spaces. Triggered by lobbying efforts of meat industry stakeholders and taking place largely in the legal terrain, the counter-narrative is not critical of the technologies and processes deployed to bring the material about. Rather, and at this stage, it largely casts doubt on the nature of the material itself and what actions bring meat into existence. This line of discussion is concerned with the ontology of meat and of biofabricated animal material, that is, it is concerned with what an object is in reality to different groups, how it comes to be that object, and the ways in which these varying understandings of the reality intersect, diverge and influence outcomes (Mol, Body Multiple; Law and Lien).Before public attention was drawn to this new material and the suite of related, emerging technologies being developed to create it, what meat was and how it came about has been relatively stable. We generally understood meat to be specific kinds of animal flesh, prepared in particular ways in accordance with cultural norms, and which were extracted from a dead animal in a farming context. Even with the rise of plant-based norms within meat cultures, meat was still understood as being animal flesh. Indeed, the animal welfare and animal rights movements have in part reinforced the ontology of meat with their emphasis on the interests of the animal in the context of meat production and consumption, while the cognitive dissonance that “guilty meat-eaters” experience when consuming meat stems in part from their understanding of meat as animal flesh derived from an animal killed in order to provide flesh. Yet, the accepted reality—i.e. the ontology—of meat has recently become destabilised. Meat is now the subject of multiple interpretations, or ontologies, of how meat is meat, which realities compete in debates about legal definitions of meat.Broadly, proponents of biofabricated animal material understand meat to be anything that is animal flesh regardless of the processes that made it come about, including whether the flesh was ever part of a body. This ontology is being deployed in a political way to support the collective, discursively constructed expectations that biofabricated animal material will disrupt meat culture, while assuring consumers that the material is, in reality, still meat. Meanwhile opponents focus on the enactment of meat, that is, the agricultural practices that go into making “animal flesh” and turning it into meat. These contesting ontologies are playing out in largely legal arenas to date, suggesting that what is legally defined as meat will have political and cultural consequences for the future of food.Yet, this article calls into question how different the parallel ontologies of meat are in terms of the realities they enact. It argues that while biofabricated animal material is expected to transform the production and consumption of meat, the material’s ontologies reinforce existing interrelationships between the dominant meat culture and the law. Additionally, the expectations surrounding biofabricated animal material vests the material with transformative power, even though it does not challenge the structural factors, namely law and culture, which underlie the exploitation and commodification of animals. I begin by delineating the co-constituting relationship between law, the realities of meat production and consumption, and meat culture. I then unpack the interface between different ontologies of meat and consider why the contest has taken place in legal terrains. From here, I consider the key expectations that have assigned transformative power to biofabricated animal material. I suggest that these expectations work to reinforce existing meat culture, and the configurations of power that benefit from it, as supported via legal instruments.Meat, Meat Culture and the Law Central to cultural legal studies is the theory of “law as culture” rather than law and culture being separate spaces that occasionally intersect (Mezey; Sarat and Simon; Ewick and Silbey; cf. Schlag). This understanding sees law and culture as non-static dimensions co-constructing each other, and law as a particular cultural product through its ability to make and stabilise meaning (Weisbrod; Mezey). Scholars in this space have unpacked some of the ways in which the meanings, practices and sources associated with the law influence ways of being, sensing and knowing on a day-to-day level by “shaping consciousness and making asymmetries of power seem, if not invisible, then natural and benign” (Sarat and Simon 19; see also Marusek).Drawing on this body of work, law and meat culture can be understood as mutually building and reinforcing each other; simultaneously, relevant laws are an artefact of meat culture. Potts (19–20) uses the term “meat culture” to refer to expressions of carnism (Joy chap. 2), including “the representations and discourses, practices and behaviours, diets and tastes that generate shared beliefs about, perspectives on, and experiences of meat.” Carnism is the ideology that condones and legitimises the killing and eating of particular animals. Expressions of carnism construct meat as a food that is “natural, normal, necessary and nice” (Piazza et al.). Laws that condone and enable intensive animal agriculture are an expression of meat culture, as are legal definitions that demarcate the material dimensions of meat. Simultaneously, the role of law in representing and locking-in meat culture is an outcome of socio-cultural processes that diffuse meat culture based on carnism.This co-constructing relationship between law and meat culture is especially evident in the statutory provisions that recognise animals as capable of being the object to which private property rights determine relations (for instance, s. 12 of the Animal Care and Protection Act 2001 (Qld)). Humans, as opposed to animals, are positioned as having a higher moral status that automatically attracts rights to life and to a certain standard of treatment by others and governments (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Hence, animals are objects of human and corporate ownership rather than holders of rights due to their intrinsic worthiness as living beings. This understanding of animals as commodities both embodies and reinforces contemporary meat culture, and especially Western notions of human-animal relations based on subordination and domination (Huggan and Tiffin 10).The absence of formal law further enables meat-eating cultures stemming from a carnist ideology. In Australia, animal welfare laws recognise that farm animals experience pain and suffering via generic animal cruelty offences that would consider as “cruel” many routine husbandry practices and animal slaughtering. However, most animal welfare laws provide a defence to, or exemption for, actions of a producer that would otherwise constitute an animal cruelty offence if the same actions were directed towards companion animals. In order to provide an effec tive defence or exception, the producer must have acted in compliance with codes of practice set by farm industry groups (see, e.g., Animal Welfare Act (SA) s. 43). Unsurprisingly, given the vested interest of the industry, the standards set for farm animal welfare are broadly inconsistent with the standards for animal welfare expected by Australian publics (see, e.g., Doughty et al.; Coleman). Goodfellow suggests that the failure of Australian welfare standards to meet public expectations and basic animal welfare principles represents a kind of meat-based “cultural capture”. The perceptions and values of industry have become absorbed by those regulatory agencies created to regulate for animal welfare consistent with community expectations (Goodfellow 197).Finally, law works to obscure intensive animal agricultural methods and mass processing and retail of animal flesh products. For instance, law and legal institutions prevent documentation of intensive animal agriculture facilities (ABC v Lenah Game Meats), and through its absence enables the misrepresentation of on-farm conditions on food labels (Parker et al.).Law’s role in embodying and perpetuating meat culture is further explored in popular culture and legal cultural studies. For instance, the Netflix film Okja confronts the links between capitalism, especially market-based approaches to regulating societies, and intensive animal agriculture, while highlighting the related disconnects between humans, animals and nature. Gunawan, through a jurisprudential reading of the Netflix film Okja, explained how the film “highlights law’s desire for a legal landscape grounded in fictional constructs – the fiction that some animals have a higher moral status than others” (264). Because Okja does not fit neatly into the existing categories of human or non-human animal, the film unpacks how laws categorise living bodies in ways that can be considered arbitrary and inconsistent while being compliant with dominant meat culture.Contemporary meat culture and its constitutive relationship with law is associated with European colonial systems of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Colonial processes expanded specialised farms in settler colonial states and led to large amounts of meat being exported to European countries (Friedmann and McMichael). The violence associated with these changes, for humans, animals and the environment, were legitimated by law that both legitimised European domination and was used as a tool for asserting domination over human and non-human animal populations (McBride).Colonial expressions of meat culture connected the high consumption of animal flesh in Western diets with white supremacy, strength and masculinity; meanwhile, the diets of Indigenous populations, which tended to be more plant-based, were portrayed as lesser and a cause of their perceived inferiority as non-whites (see, e.g., Leroy and Praet). Gambert and Linné through their media analysis of #Soyboy tweets observed how colonial representations of meat-based diets as superior to plant-based diets continued to be highly influential on Western culture and politics. They explained that the use of #Soyboy in alt-right media must be understood as “a contemporary extension of colonial era tropes of plant-food masculinity like the ‘effeminized rice eater’ of the late 19th-century … and as an example of the way the alt-right uses irony and humor to advance its often dead-serious views.”Globalising, capitalist processes in the mid- to late 20th century followed the trajectory set down during colonisation as capital, markets, governments and authorities continued the expansion of large-scale, intensive production of meat, combined with increasing consumption of animal flesh typified by high productivity and low animal welfare (Goodfellow; D’silva). These changes are integrated with, and were enabled by, broader globalising capitalist processes that further incentivised intensive animal agriculture, and technological transfer programs to “modernise” animal agriculture in developing countries (see, e.g., Gonzalez). These processes and other societal and cultural changes facilitated the “nutrition transition,” that is, the global shift away from Indigenous and traditional diets and towards Western diets typified by a high consumption of animal products (Popkin).Law plays a central role in legitimising and enabling the industrial ways of making animals into meat. It provides the “methodology by which it is possible to continue forms of domination” (Wadiwel 287). Intellectual property law played a profound role in enabling the agricultural research and development for intensive animal agriculture, especially through the expansion of intellectual property rights over animal genetics (Kloppenburg; Aoki). Indeed, private investment in agriculture continues to increase including for intensive animal agriculture technologies (Pardey et al.), while the space for developing alternate ways of agriculture narrows (Johnson). Law also provides standards of meat production and composition suited to industrial facilities, which fosters citizen-consumer trust and legitimacy in the system despite the increased risk and scale of food safety issues associated with intensive animal agriculture (see, e.g., Webber et al.).Legal Definitions of Meat and Ontological PoliticsCollectively deployed, discursive expectations regarding biofabricated animal material have successfully destabilised a broadly accepted singular ontology of meat, that is, the pre-existing reality of meat as flesh extracted from an animal enacted in a farming context (Jönsson et al.). While different groups assign particular symbolic qualities to meat, the objective understanding of reality was that meat was muscle tissue that had formed part of an animal’s body and was culturally considered edible. Parallel to debates on the nature of “milk,” the destabilisation of meat has played out largely on legal terrains. Specifically, meat industry groups informally or formally have called for legal definitions of meat that understand the material to be directly derived from the carcass of an animal (McCarthy and Brann).A key moment in in the breaking of the singular ontology of meat was the US Cattlemen’s Association’s filing of a petition to the US Department of Agriculture. This petition requested, among other things, that the definition of meat be the “tissue or flesh of animals that have been harvested in the traditional manner” and should be used to “inform consumers that the product is derived naturally from animals” (2). The reality produced in this petition, and then conveyed through the media, is that meat is the entire body of a dead animal or parts cut off from a body of a dead animal. Moreover, the petition positioned intensive animal agriculture as traditional and natural while the biofabrication of animal material was unconventional and artificial. For the meat industry, meat is enacted through practices from breeding, raising, and slaughtering animals which instills the end product of meat with not only its existence as meat but also its other qualities like naturalness and healthfulness (Mol, Body Multiple). According to this perspective, muscle tissue is not meat unless it is enacted in particular ways.Although the influence of law on cultural and social structures is neither linear nor complete, law still has a unique ontological-political power to categorise things in ways that widely influence and coordinate behavior (Ruiter; Mol, “Ontological”; Viljanen; Deakin). In other words, law configures and reconfigures a real practice, relationship or event into fictitious legal categories (Ewick and Silbey 16). The contestation over meat and the focus on legal definitions certainly reflects a general awareness of the ontological-political power of law, which was a theme further explored in Okja, discussed above.The law in the US, as well as in Australia, have definitions of meat that would, mostly and depending on the processes used, exclude biofabricated animal material (see, e.g., Johnson). Legal definitions of meat tend to align with the reality of meat that opponents of biofabricated animal material hold and which definitions are consistent with dominant cultural understandings of meat. Thus, political and ontological debate about meat taking place in legal terrains is not due to any lack of clarity in legal categories that require the law to represent a societal decision between two or more ontologies. Rather, the debate is an attempt to influence the social and cultural ontologies of meat that interact and underpin the legal definitions of meat in order to influence consumer acceptability and markets. In this way, the debate over what meat is and how meat comes about is reminiscent of other battles over “mouths, minds and markets” (Lang and Heasman). As the next section illustrates, however, what meat is and how it is enacted by consumers and retailers as meat does not change at the retail and consumer end of the food chain.Just Meat But Still Transformative?  Figure 1: Fictional representation of possible future “meat” products (Hayden McNamara 2018)The conjectures about what biofabricated animal material will do for the environment, for human health, and for animals are merely the collective “imaginings, expectations and visions” of stakeholders with an interest, commercial and political, in the material (Borup et al. 385). An emerging body of literature has undertaken discourse analyses on the collectively deployed, discursively constructed expectations for biofabricated animal material across spaces including scholarly works, mass media and public comments. Broadly, this body of work finds that the collective expectations deployed by proponents in relation to biofabricated animal material have been uncritically taken up in mass media, scholarship (Dilworth and McGregor), and among its developers (Chiles). Studies on public perceptions of biofabricated animal material suggest that the general public also expect benefits to eventuate for animals, humans and the environment, perhaps to a lesser extent, while the publics examined simultaneously conceive of biofabricated animal material as “unnatural” and animal flesh from an animal as “natural” (Laestadius and Caldwell; Wilks and Phillips).Although the dominant expectations overlap, I categorise them as follows:Biofabricated animal material will be available on a commercial scale.The material is meat. Consumer uptake will be such that market signals will result in a decline in intensive animal agriculture.A decline in animal agriculture will reduce, if not remove entirely, the significant suffering and harms associated with its performance. This decline will be causally associated with healthier, safer and happier environments for humans and animals.Unpacking the expectations in this way shows the technological determinist ideologies at play and from which these discursive constructs stem. Accordingly, practical pathways for such a transition or the multiple assumptions and variables underpinning the expected benefits are absent.Collective and discursively constructed expectations are an essential component to technological innovation for attracting investment, gaining regulatory acceptance and inspiring and attracting developers. Such expectations are also shaping the agenda and the actors involved (van Lente and Rip). For instance, the expectations that biofabricated animal material will be “victimless” has mobilized animal interest groups and non-governmental actors who, in various ways, advocate for biofabricated animal material. The expectations for a victimless animal flesh product have been so compelling, consistent with Western ideas of technology and progress (Jasanoff), that various truths about the current processes have not prevented these coalitions forming. These include that biofabricated animal material is yet to be produced on a commercial scale due to technological barriers (Bhat et al.), and that the processes commonly entail slaughtering animals. The extraction of cells from the “donor” animal, for instance, commonly relies on the use of invasive and lethal procedures to extract the tissue containing the cells (see, e.g., Genovese et al. 4; Burton et al.). Moreover, tissue samples must be taken repeatedly because their proliferation abilities are not well conserved in the cell culture (Boonen and Post).Meanwhile, foetal bovine serum is the main ingredient in mediums used to grow biofabricated animal material because it is an especially good source of growth factors. This serum is essentially refined blood from the foetus of a pregnant cow. To maintain blood quality, the method for drawing out the blood is particularly invasive. The foetus is “alive” within the removed uterus while its heart is punctured with a needle and its blood is drained (van der Valk et al.). Thus, expectations are being collectively deployed in ways that obscure the violence that is still implicated in the consumption of animal flesh, analogous to how animal welfare claims on food labels misrepresent the processes and decisions behind the product.Importantly, the expectations about biofabricated animal material also represent and reinforce a particular understanding of what the problem is with animal agriculture and food systems more generally (Bacchi). Broadly, biofabricated animal material is expected to solve the ills associated with the mass-production and consumption of animal flesh leaving unproblematic the underlying cultural, political, legal and social structures that enabled these harms in the first place. Reflecting this problem-solution construct, Bill Gates wrote on his blog:The demand for meat will have doubled between 2000 and 2050. This is happening in large part because economies are growing and people can afford more meat. That’s all good news. But raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact. Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. (As much as I like vegetables, I know I wouldn’t want to give up hamburgers – one of my favorite foods). That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.It is common for such neo-Malthusian reasoning to be deployed in support of capital-intensive, industrial agricultural technologies, and that laws that enable and protect them. Yet, the projections about how much meat production “needs” to increase are being conveyed as normative claims about what food systems should do, rather than what the projections are intended to provide: predictions about the future based on current trends so we can intervene now. That is, statistics about how much food and meat production must increase by are based on a continuation of current trends such as high rates of meat consumption and food waste rather than a systemic transformation. As the FAO stated in relation to its own projections regarding growing populations and increasing meat demand, the projections are positive statements of “the most likely future … not necessarily the most desirable one” (Bruinsma 1). By treating these projections as targets, expectations for biofabricated animal material normalise the increasing consumption of meat and leave out the possibility of other trajectories, such as, the further mainstreaming of plant-based diets.Along with being non-disruptive of dominant meat culture (Goldstein), the expectations conveyed implicitly condone market-based approaches to the ethical, environmental and social issues intertwined with production and consumption patterns. They position consumer-citizens as capable of “voting with their fork” to bring about a better food system by purchasing biofabricated animal material. Meanwhile, the fact that biofabricated animal material is being developed within existing configurations of power and wealth is absent from the expectations surrounding the ability of biofabricated animal material to disrupt agriculture. For instance, Tyson and Cargill, two of the world’s largest meat processing companies, have invested into companies devel oping the material.Critical engagement with the dominant meat culture that condones and legitimises the exploitation of animals, and with the law that reflects and enables it, is absent from the collective expectations about biofabricated animal material. Other methods for addressing the multiple harms associated with industrial agriculture, for instance a meat tax, incentives for plant-based businesses, educational campaigns to promote plant-based diets, are not within the problem-solution equation underlying expectations about biofabricated animal material. Rather, the expectations for the material as meat continues problematic aspects of meat culture that place “the highest symbolic value on flesh foods and the lowest value on plant foods” (Lee 80). 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Abstract: About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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Abstract: Introduction Animals have a significant presence in human lives, with many human interactions involving animals. This role of animals in social life, however, has largely been ignored and marginalised. In the words of Tovey (197), “to read most sociological texts, one might never know that society is populated by non-human as well as human animals”. Human-animal relations are evident in everyday human uses of animals as companions, pets, meat sources, and entertainment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does demonstrate how humans create and perpetuate systems of human/animal difference which are, at times, contradictory and ambivalent. There are no consistencies in how humans view and understand animal bodies. These differences matter, as they have serious consequences for how humans view and treat animals. It also has dire consequences for animals. While humans and animals are different species, we still live together, co-evolve, and create shared histories. We are, in the words of Haraway, companion species. This exposes that animals are not just nature, but culture. It is often forgotten that one of the everyday uses of animals is as testing and experimental models in medical and scientific research. Hidden away in laboratories, these animals remain invisible, only to be discovered when the histories of innovations and breakthroughs are unravelled. Animals are veiled behind dissection, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, insulin injections, deep brain stimulation, and so on. Of interest in this paper is one potential medico-scientific innovation that cannot disguise the animal body as it is central for the success of the technology, xenotransplantation (XTP; animal-to-human transplantation). This refers to “any procedure that involves transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of cells, tissues or organs from a nonhuman animal source” (Xenotransplantation Working Party 22, original emphasis). While many animals have been used historically in XTP, the choice animal source is currently pigs. In order for xenotransplants to perform the required functions in a human body, the fragments of the pig’s body must remain living. This fuses the living pig part and living human body intimately, where the embodiment and functionality of each relies on the other. Such practices theoretically break down the traditional dualisms between humans/pigs and self/other. However, XTP raises a number of scientific, ethical, and social hurdles that must be addressed. As Bijker, Hughes and Pinch indicate, technical innovations are not simply scientific endeavours but sociocultural issues where usage, design, and content can be contentious. In the case of XTP this relates to, amongst other issues, the explicit physical breakdown of the human/pig divide, yet boundary work still occurs in an attempt to symbolically maintain the divisions between self/other. Drawing on the work of various cultural theorists, this paper presents a sociocultural approach to examine how XTP and the associated manufacturing of pigs, demonstrates the fluidity of science and culture. This is achieved by incorporating theoretical frameworks inspired by Durkheimian thought, such as the sacred and profane, and Douglas’ use of pollution and dirt. This analysis reveals how classificatory systems of culture, such as the sanctity of the body and its boundaries, are powerful obstacles to the cultural acceptance of XTP. The Sacred Body In the work of Durkheim and his Année Sociologique colleagues, the sacred and the profane are distinct classifications attached to material objects. These binary constructs are the basis for religious life, as argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The Durkheimian tradition also argues that these building blocks of religion are apparent in secular cultural life. The world (the profane) drives people to engage with the sacred or those places, objects, and people that are collectively valued with high esteem. In contrast, the profane is marginalised. The narratives/myths which underpin the sacred provide a type of collective fervour that stands in opposition to the mundane flows of the everyday. Through this process, high or low social value is attributed. Durkheim later considered that this duality also existed within the human. Individuals experience a double-being, where the mind (soul) and the body are, repeating Cartesianism, radically different, opposed, and independent substances. The soul holds sacred qualities “that has always been denied the body” (Durkheim, The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions, 150-1), which renders the body profane and the soul divine. In the contemporary West, however, there has been a significant shift away from the soul and towards the body. Turner argues that we have become a “somatic society”, where increasingly this once profane site has become a cultural obsession. The body has become a site of performance and consumption, where the self is realised and practiced. This has lead to intense rituals, such as disciplining the body through fitness training (Sassatelli) to personal grooming practices (Goffman), that seek to separate the body from polluting or profane influences. The body is no longer approached as sinful and demeaning to the soul. It has become culturally conceived as collectively sacred. At the same time, certain attributes of the body can and do signify disgust or profane qualities. As Kendall and Michael have argued, the body is a site of order and disorder. While our best efforts are implemented to ensure that the body’s biological, social, and cultural features remain ordered, the natural processes of excretion, decay, disease, and other undesirable disorders, consistently impinge on and challenge the sacred body. Significant effort ensures, as Goffman argues, that these undesirable attributes are hidden or removed from public view through secular rituals of purification. We can relate this to the prominent use in the West of anti-ageing products to the compulsion to institutionalise the ill, diseased, and elderly. Douglas follows this Durkheimian inspired tradition, utilising concepts such as purity, pollution, and danger. These are theoretically similar to the sacred/profane distinction, which we believe lends significant insight into the dialectic of human/animal bodies in XTP. To illustrate this further, we will briefly touch upon her contribution to cultural theory that serves as the basis for our arguments here. Purity, Danger and XTP: Being ‘Out of Order’ In her significant work, Purity and Danger, Douglas exposes the deeply embedded systems of classification that underpin social life. To exemplify this, she examines ‘dirt’ and questions why we feel it necessary to clean. Her answer is that dirt reflects a “systematic ordering and classification of matter”, that is “matter out of place” (35). In other words, our social lives are ordered according to those ‘matters’ classified as belonging or coherent in the flows of everyday life. Dirt transcends this ‘ordering’ and creates disorder. This then requires action on behalf of the individual to ‘reorder’ their surrounds through purification rituals. Douglas is able then to extract this theoretical point into various examples, such as the cultural classifications and uses of pigs. Culture categorises animals in relation to how they are to be consumed or enjoyed, as already stated. A range of relatively recent sociological projects, such as Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology program, are revealing how the animal world is culturally determined. For instance, Zerubavel demonstrates that repulsion towards certain foods, especially animal, may cause physical distress to the individual. This is not linked to our gastronomies, but sociocultural perceptions embedded in our individual minds (cf. Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’). This is also demonstrated by how classificatory systems deny the human consumption of certain animals. For instance, the taboo on consuming pork for Israelites rests for Douglas on the inability for the pig to be classified as a normal farm animal because it has cloven hooves and does not chew cud. Through this cultural perception, the pig is defined as pollution, impinging on the sanctity of the soul and sitting uncomfortably in collective thought. It resides on the margins and threatens our social order. In other words, what is safe and what is dangerous are differentiated culturally. What a pig represents in one culture can differ dramatically from the next. In the world of XTP, similar impressions remain embedded in the cognitive processes of individuals, thus creating conflict between cultural norms and values, and that of science (cf. Alexander and Smith). A further important point needs to be considered before discussing XTP explicitly. As suggested earlier, Douglas argues that some of the most dangerous cultural artefacts/objects to our sense of order are those which impinge on the pure through their unclassifiable nature. However, partial objects from these polluted things can also cause distress. Contemporary examples are bodily fluids, excretions, and other naturally occurring by-products of the body. These are generally held as disgusting within cultural contexts once removed from the body. Douglas explains this through their symbolic connection to a ‘human’ identity. She writes that these mundane objects remain “dangerous; their half identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence” (160). Fluids, such as mucus, when found in the home or other ‘ordered’ situations are considered most disgusting not because of the substance itself, but because it remains connected to the embodiment and identity of the other. Until that substance is cleansed from view, or reordered, it impinges on order in the most dangerous ways because of its ‘half identity’. It is still connected to its host. From this perspective, we can begin to envisage why the consumption of animals is closely governed by specific classificatory systems. The presentation of whole animals cooked, with head and limbs attached, may invoke disgust through the inability to completely remove the animal’s identity. Whole ducks, fish, or pigs presented at the dinner table, with their eyes gazing at the diners, can cause significant distress. The identity of the animal is reaffirmed and a reaction of disgust can occur. The reappropriation of animals as cuts of meat and meat-based products, can strip away the identity of the animal by dividing it into parts. This reordering makes it appropriate and pure for human consumption. By carving the body of an animal into pieces, it becomes a product that is removed from the living being. This is extended through ‘meat discourses’; the pig becomes pork, ham and bacon, and an anaemic calf becomes veal. It is meat; just another object in the cultural universe. In viewing XTP as a cultural artefact, these significantly stringent classifications of the pure and polluting remain deeply embedded and potent. Pig organs such as the heart remain, despite any cleansing processes undertaken by science and unlike the reappropriation of animals for consumption, linked to the pig’s embodiment. The removal of this body part does not remove it from the pig’s identity. It remains connected, clinging to its ‘half identity’. Furthermore, unlike the meat industry or various other medico-scientific uses of animals, it is vital that the pig’s body parts remain living. Xenotransplants would not function without, for example, the pig’s heart continuing to beat, pumping blood around the new human body it inhabits. This creates cultural barriers that go beyond the ordered animal products that currently exist, which serves to threaten the acceptance and successful appropriation of XTP amongst society. There is then a culturally perceived taboo on combining the self and other in XTP. Pig bodies must somehow be ‘cleansed’ by science, although, as we alluded to previously, this is not necessarily successful. These rituals of purification by science are undertaken for scientific and cultural reasons. For example, Cook outlines that scientists working in XTP go to great lengths to justify why the polluting other, the pig, can and should be used as the source animal. This involves a complex narration on the differences and similarities between humans and animals. Significantly, XTP relies on and perpetuates the differential cultural worth that is placed on human life (high value) and animal life (low value), in order to justify XTP procedures. However, pig parts need to become worthy of being harvested for human bodies, meaning that pigs must be elevated from their lowly status to that worthy of being human. This leads science to engage in, according to Cook, a complex interweaving of desirable-similarity, desirable-dissimilarity, undesirable-similarity, and undesirable-dissimilarity, to establish continuities and disparities between pig and human bodies. This functions not only for the purposes of science, but to culturally justify the practices and artefacts of XTP. While XTP involves intimately mixing humans and pigs, these “science stories” (Cook) additionally work to maintain species divides. Simulta neously, these processes operate to justify that it is appropriate for humans to embody pigs. Hence, science attempts to mould the social into desirable ways of thinking about XTP, thus supporting it and the science behind it. This includes the experimental and therapeutic sacrifice of pigs. At the same time, science cannot avoid that the practice and delivery of XTP involves the culturally pure/sacred human body coming into conflict with the polluted/dangerous ‘other’, pig part/s. The genetic engineering of pigs to express select human complementary regulatory proteins, which inhibit self-damage when the immune system reacts to the presence of a foreign body such as a transplanted organ, somewhat disintegrates the human/animal divide within the pig body itself. It is becoming human. However, science still faces a significant hurdle. Namely, “How can we physically mix (natural-technical discourse) if we’re so different (social-moral discourse)?” (Brown 333). Pig parts in human bodies, and pigs genetically engineered to be more ‘human like’, still involve pig parts being out of place and therefore disgusting. Despite the rituals employed by science to draw similarities between humans and pigs (and genetically engineered pigs), there remain cultural classification systems that compromise the normalisation of XTP. Hence, crossing the species divide in XTP is scientifically unproblematic (though getting XTP to work is another matter), but the fusing of human and pig bodies may still be culturally dangerous. In other words, cultural classifications may render pigs as incompatible with humans, despite any social constructions attempted by science. The body expresses these social values. In XTP, porcine genetics cannot be physically separated from their social and genetic being. Incorporating this with the human can cause disgust, even amongst those who have received xenotransplants: “I wonder how much from an animal can be introduced into my body before my humanity vanishes” (porcine cellular xenotransplant recipient qtd. in Lundin 150). While science may reduce the body to mechanistic functioning and seek to objectify it, the body, be it human or pig, possesses material-semiotic importance. The heart is not simply a pump; it is symbolically powerful. A xenotransplanted pig heart challenges the sanctity of the human body and how the human body and its parts are culturally constructed. However, the potentiality of XTP to save a life may trump any individual concerns, even if an individual may reject it culturally (Lundin). There still remains another dilemma that cannot be subsumed by such negotiations—the potentiality of cross-species viral infections (zoonosis) that could result from the embodied fusion of living pig parts and living human bodies. While a detailed examination of this is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that the social fears of zoonosis, such as avian influenza (bird flu) and swine influenza, have resulted in increased international collaborative efforts to study and halt the global spread of contagion. While there are a number of differences between these zoonotic infections and any unforeseen zoonotic consequences of XTP, what is of significance is the boundary pollution. That is, all forms of animal-to-human zoonosis involve a violation of the sacred human body by the dirty and profane other. For example, the recent outbreaks of swine influenza involved disparate species coming into contact with each other through disgusting body products, namely contaminated droplets emitted by infected individuals sneezing or coughing. The physical bodies of humans and animals, however, still remain differentiated even if zoonosis symbolically challenges such classifications. XTP, on the other hand, is an intimate physical and symbolic fusion of these bodies. The human and the animal can no longer be separated as independent beings. Thus, the potential of pollution from XTP moves beyond the fear of the symbolically disgusting pig body and the symbolism of particular body parts, to include what the pig parts may actually physically carry with them. As a result, the cultural dangers of transplanted pig parts and their potential violations are not just symbolic, but also materially ‘real’. Conclusion By categorising animals as a lower species, humans enable their exploitation and use in a multitude of ways. This process of cultural classification in the contemporary West means that we attribute a sacred, high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies. While the scientific intermingling of human and pig bodies in XTP could be seen to present a cultural challenge to these species dualisms, it does not overcome such cultural classifications. That is, the interests and social constructions of pigs by science cannot overpower or suppress the sociocultural. The removal of pig parts from the pig’s body does not eliminate its ‘half identity’. It is still a living product from an animal’s body. Unlike other pig products, life cannot be removed from the pig parts for XTP, as this is the vital function required for xenotransplants to (potentially) work. A heart needs to beat. Any purification rituals undertaken by science, such as using pigs genetically engineered with human proteins, cannot overcome this cultural construction. While it may be argued that XTP will become culturally acceptable with time, this disrespects how social knowledges are as equally important as the scientific. This further disavows that cultural concerns over mixing pig and human bodies are as viable as scientific constructions. This is perhaps most potently highlighted by zoonosis. Thus, the pigs used in XTP have cultural-technical bodies that are materially and symbolically significant, which science cannot purge. References Alexander, J. C. and P. Smith. “Social Science and Salvation: Risk Society as Mythical Discourse.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 25 (1996): 251-262. Bijker, W.E., T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch. Eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Bourdieu, P. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge, 1986. Brown, N. “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing Disgust”. Science as Culture 8 (1999): 327-55. Cook, P.S. “Science Stories: Selecting the Source Animal for Xenotransplantation.” Social Change in the 21st Century 2006 Conference Proceedings. Eds. C. Hopkinson and C. Hall. Centre for Social Change Research, School of Humanities and Human Services, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2006. 6 Aug. 2010. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1976[1966]. Durkheim, E. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: The Free Press, 1995[1912] . Durkheim, E. “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions.” Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Works. Ed. R. Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973[1914]. Goffman, E. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Haraway, D. J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Kendall, G. and M. Michael “Order and Disorder: Time, Technology and the Self.” Culture Machine, Interzone, Nov. 2001. 6 Aug. 2010 .Lundin, S. “Understanding Cultural Perspectives on Clinical Xenotransplantation.” Graft 4.2 (1999): 150-153. Sassatelli, R. “The Commercialization of DIscipline: Keep-fit Culture and its Values.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5.3 (2000): 396-411. Tovey, H. “Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals.” Sociologia Ruralis 43.3 (2003): 196-215. Turner, B.S. The body and society: explorations in social theory. Second Ed. London: Sage, 1996. Xenotransplantation Working Party. Animal-to-Human Transplantation Research: How Should Australian Proceed? Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2003. Zerubavel, E. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard Un iversity Press, 1997.  

Abstract: Since the mid-eighties, personality and mood have undergone vigorous surveillance and repair across new populations in the United States. While government and the psy-complexes 1 have always had a stake in promoting citizen health, it is unique that, today, State, industry, and non-governmental organisations recruit consumers to act upon their own mental health. And while citizen behaviours in public spaces have long been fodder for diagnosis, the scope of behaviours and the breadth of the surveyed population has expanded significantly over the past twenty years. How has the notion of behavioural illness been successfully spun to recruit new populations to behavioural diagnosis and repair? Why is it a reasonable proposition that our personalities might be sick, our moods ill? This essay investigates the cultural promotion of a 'script' that assumes sick moods are possible, encourages the self-assessment of risk and self-management of dysfunctional mood, and has thus helped to create a new, adjustable subject. Michel Foucault (1976, 1988) contended that in order for subjects to act upon their selves -- for example, assess themselves via the behavioural health script -- we must view the Self as a construction, a work in progress that is alterable and in need of alteration in order for psychiatric action to seem appropriate. This conception of the self constitutes an extreme theoretical shift from the early modern belief (of Rousseau or Kant) that a core soul inhabited and shaped being, or the moral self.2 Foucault (1976) insisted that subjects are 'not born but made' through formal and informal social discourses that construct knowledge of the 'normal' self. Throughout the 19th century and the modern era, as medical, juridical, and psychiatric institutions gained increasing cultural capital, the normal self became allegedly 'knowable' through science. In turn, the citizen became 'professionalised' (Funicello 1993) -- answerable to these constructed standards, or subject to what Foucault termed biopower. In order to avoid punishments wrested upon the 'deviant' such as being placed in asylum or criminalised, citizens capitulated to social norms, and thus helped the State to achieve social order. 3 While 'technologies of power' or domination determined the conduct of individuals in the premodern era, 'technologies of the self' became prominent in the modern era.4 (Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self') These, explained Foucault, permit individuals to act upon their 'bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being' to transform them, to attain happiness, or perfection, among other things (18). Contemporary psychiatric discourses, for example, call upon citizens to transform via self-regulation, and thus lessened the State's disciplinary burden. Since the mid-twentieth century, biopsychiatry has been embraced nationally, and played a key role in propagating self-disciplining citizens. Biopsychiatric logic is viewed culturally as common sense due to a number of occurrences. The dominant media have enthusiastically celebrated so-called biotechnical successes, such as sheep cloning and the development of better drugs to treat Schizophrenia. Hype has also surrounded newer drugs to treat depression (i.e. Prozac) and anxiety (i.e. Paxil), as well as the 'cosmetic' use of antidepressants to allegedly improve personality.5 Citizens, then, are enlisted to trust in psychiatric science to repair mood dysfunction, but also to reveal the 'true' self, occluded by biologically impaired mood. Suggesting that biopsychiatry's 'knowledge' of the human brain has revealed the human condition and can repair sick selves, these discourses have helped to launch the behavioural health script into the national psyche. The successful marketing of the script was also achieved by the diagnostic philosophy encouraged by revisions of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or Mental Disorders(the DSM; these renovations increased the number of affective (mood) and personality diagnoses and broadened diagnostic criteria. The new DSMs 6 institutionalised the pathologisation of common personality and mood distresses as biological or genetic disorders. The texts constitute 'knowledge' of normal personality and behaviour, and press consumers toward biotechnical tools to repair the defunct self. Ian Hacking (1995) suggests that new moral concepts emerge when old ones acquire new connotations, thereby affecting our sense of who we are. The once moral self, known through introspection, is thus transformed via biopsychiatry into a self that is constructed in accordance with scientific 'knowledge'. The State and various private industries have a stake in promoting this Sick Self script. Promoting Diagnosis of the Sick Self Employing the DSM's broad criteria, research by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), contends that a significant percentage of the population is behaviourally ill. The most recent Surgeon General report on Mental Health (from 1999) which also employed broad criteria, argues that a striking 50 million Americans are afflicted with a mental illness each year, most of which were non-major disorders affecting behaviour, personality and mood.7 Additionally, studies suggest that behavioural illness results in lost work days and increases demand for health services, thus constituting a severe financial burden to the State. Such studies consequently provide the State with ample reason to promote behavioural illness. In predicting an epidemic in behavioural illness and a huge increase in mental health service needs, the State has constructed health policy in accordance with the behavioural sickness script. Health policy embraces DSM diagnostic tools that sweep in a wide population by diagnosing risk as illness and links diagnosis with biotechnical recovery methods. Because criteria for these disorders have expanded and diagnoses have become more vague, however, over-diagnosis of the population has become common . 8 Depression, for example, is broadly defined to include moods ranging from the blues to suicidal ideation. Yet, the Sick Self script is ubiquitously embraced by NGO, industry, and State discourses, calling for consumer self-scrutiny and strongly promoting psychopharmaceuticals. These activities has been most successful; to wit: personality disorders were among the most common diagnoses of the 80's, and depression, which was a rare disorder thirty-five years ago, became the most common mental illness in the late 90's (Healy). Consumer Health Groups & Industry Promotions Health institutions and drug industries promote mood illness and market drug remedies as a means of profit maximisation. Broad spectrum diagnoses are, by definition, easy to sell to a wide population and create a vast market for recovery products. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies (each multibillion dollar industries), an expanding variety of self-help industries, consumer health web sites, and an array of psy-complex workers all have a stake in promoting the broad diagnosis of mood and behavioural disorders. 9 In so doing, consumer groups and the health and pharmaceutical industries not only encourage self-discipline (aligning themselves with State productivity goals), but create a vast, ongoing market for recovery products. Promoting Illness and Recovery So strong is the linkage between illness and recovery that pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly sells Prozac by promoting the broad notion of depression, rather than the drug itself. It does so through depression brochures (advertised on TV) and a web page that discusses depression symptoms and offers a depression quiz, instead of product information. Likewise, Psych Central, a typical informational health site, provides consumers standard DSM depression definitions and information (from the biopsychiatric-driven American Psychiatric Association (APA) or the NIMH, and liberal behavioural illness quizzes that typically over-diagnose consumers. 10The Psych Central site also lists a broad range of depression symptoms, while its FAQ link promotes the self-management of mood ailments. For example, the site directs those who believe that they are depressed and want help to contact a physician, obtain a diagnosis, and initiate antidepressant treatment. Such web sites, viewed as a whole, appear to deliver certified knowledge that a 'normal' mood exists, that mood disorders are common, and that abiding citizens should diagnosis and treat their mood ailment. Another essential component of the behavioural script is the suggestion that the modern self's mood is interminably sick. Because common mood distresses are fodder for diagnosis, the self is always at risk of illness, and requires vigilant self-scrutiny. The self is never a finished product. Moreover, mood sickness is insidious and quickly spirals from risk to full-blown disorder. 11 As such, behavioural illness requires on-going self-assessment. Finally, because mood sickness threatens social productivity and State financial solvency, a moral overtone is added to the mix -- good citizens are encouraged to treat their mood dysfunctions promptly, for the common good. The script thus constructs citizenship as a motive for behavioural self-scrutiny; as such, it can naturally recommend that individuals, rather than experts, take charge of the surveillance process. The recommendation of self-determined illness is also a sales feature of the script, appealing to the American ethic of individualism -- even, paradoxically, as the script proposes that science best directs us to our selves. Self-Managed Recovery Health institutions and industries that deploy this script recommend not only self-diagnosis, but also self-managed treatment as the ideal treatment. Health information web sites, for example, tend to displace the expert by encouraging consumers to pre-diagnose their selves (often via on-line quizzes) and to then consult an expert for formal diagnosis and to organise a treatment program. Like governmental heath organisation's web sites, these commonly link consumer-driven, broad-spectrum diagnosis to psycho-pharmaceutical treatment, primarily by listing drugs as the first line of treatment, and linking consumers to drug information. Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical companies support or own many 'informational' sites. Depression-net.com, for example, is owned by Organon, maker of Remeron, an SSRI in competition with Prozac.12 Still, even sites that receive little or no funding tend to display drugs prominently; for example, Internet Mental Health, which accepts no drug funding lists drugs immediately after diagnosis on the sidebar. This trend illustrates the extent to which drugs are viewed by consumers as a first step in addressing all types of mood sicknesses. Consumer health sites, geared toward Internet users seeking health care information (estimated to be 43% of the 120 million users) promote the illness-recovery link more aggressively. Dr.koop.com, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, describes itself as 'consumer-focused' and 'interactive'. Yet, the homepage of this site tends to include 'news' stories that relay the success of drugs or report on new biopsychiatric studies in depression or mental health. Some consumer sites such as Consumer health sites, geared toward Internet users seeking health care information (estimated to be 43% of the 120 million users) promote the illness-recovery link more aggressively. Dr.koop.com, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, describes itself as 'consumer-focused' and 'interactive'. Yet, the homepage of this site tends to include 'news' stories that relay the success of drugs or report on new biopsychiatric studies in depression or mental health. Some consumer sites such as WebMD prominently display links to drugstores, (such as Drugstore.com), many of which are owned in part or entirely by pharmaceutical companies.13 Similar to the common practices of direct-to-consumer advertising, both informational and consumer sites by-pass the expert, promote recovery via drugs, and direct the consumer to a doctor in search of a prescription, rather than heal th care advice. State, informational and consumer web sites all help to construct certain populations as at-risk for behavioural sickness. The NIMH information page on depression -- uncanny in its likeness to consumer health and pharmaceutical sites -- utilises the DSM definition of depression and recommends the standard regime of diagnosis and biotechnical treatments (highlighting antidepressants) most appropriate for a diagnosis of major, rather than minor, depression. The site also elaborates the broad approach to mood illness, and recommends that women, children and seniors -- groups deemed at-risk by the broad criteria -- be especially scrutinised for depression. By articulating the broad DSM definition of depression, a generalisable 'self' -- anyone suffering common ailments including sadness, lethargy or weight change -- is deemed at risk of depression or other behavioural illness. At the same time, at-risk groups are constructed as populations in need of more urgent scrutiny, namely society's less powerful individuals, rather than middle-aged males. That is, society's decision-makers--psychiatric researchers, State policy-makers, pharmaceutical CEO's, (etc) are considered least at risk for having defunct selves and productivity functioning. Selling Mood Sickness These brief examples illustrate the standard presentation of behavioural illness information on the Web and from traditional resources such as mailings, brochures, and consumer manuals. Presenting the ideal self as knowable and achievable with the help of bio-psychiatric science, these discourses encourage citizens to self-scrutinise, self-define, and even self-manage the possibility of mood or behavioural dysfunction. Because the individual gathers information, determines her pre-diagnosis, and seeks out a recovery technology, the many choices involved in behavioural scrutiny make it appear to be a free and 'democratic' activity. Additionally, as individuals take on the role of the expert, self-diagnosing via questionnaires, the highly disciplinary nature of the behavioural diagnosis appears unthreatening to individual sovereignty. Thus, this technology of the self solves an age-old problem of capitalist democracy -- how to simultaneously instill citizen's faith in absolute individual liberty (as a source of good government), and, at the same time, the need to achieve the absolute governance of the individual (Miller). Foucault contended that citizens are brought into the social contract of citizenship not simply through social and governmental contracts but by processes of policing that become embedded in our notions of citizenship. The process of self-management recommended by the ubiquitous behavioural script functions smoothly as a technology of surveillance in this era, where the ideal self is known and repaired through biopsychiatric science, the democratic responsibility of a good citizen. The liberal contract has always entailed an exchange of rights for freedoms -- in Rousseau's terms 'making men free by making them subjects.' (Miller xviii) When we make ourselves subjects to ongoing behavioural scrutiny, the resulting Self is not freed, rather it is constrained by a perpetual sickness. Notes 1 This term is used in a Foucaultian sense, to refer to all those who work under and benefit or profit from the dominant biological model of psychiatry dominant since the 1950's in the U.S. 2 For more discussion, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul; Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. (1995) 3 In his essay 'Technologies of the Self' (1988) Foucault outlines the four major types of technologies that function as practical reason and entice citizens to behave according to constructed social standards. Among these are technologies of production (that permit us to produce things), technologies of sign systems (permitting us to use symbols), and the technologies of power and self mentioned in the above text. Through these technologies, operations of individuals become highly regulated, some visible and some difficult to perceive. The less visible technologies of the self became essential to the smooth functioning of society in the modern era. 4 'Technologies' is used to refer to mechanisms and actions of institutions or simply social norms and habits, that work, ultimately, to govern the individual, or create behaviour that serves desires of the State and dominant social bodies. 5 Peter Kramer, author of the best-selling book Listening to Prozac (1995) contends that his patients using Prozac often credited the drug with helping their true personalities to surface. 6 The two revisions occurred in 1987 and 1994. 7 Of that group, only five percent of that group suffers a 'severe' form of mental illness (such as schizophrenia, or extreme form of bipolar or obsessive compulsive disorder), while the rest suffer less severe behavioural and mood disorders. Similar research (also based on broad criteria) was published throughout the 90's suggesting an American epidemic of behavioural illness; it was claimed that 17% of the population is neurotic, while 10-15% of the population (and 30-50% of those seeking care) was said to possess a personality disorder. (Hales and Hales, 1995) 8 The most widely assigned diagnoses in this category today are: depression, multiple personality, adjustment disorder, eating disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which have extremely broad criteria, and are easily assigned to a wide segment of the population. 9The quizzes offered at these sites are standard in psychiatry; the difference here is that these are consumer-conducted. Lilly uses the Zung Self-Assessment Tool, which asks 20 broad questions regarding mood, and overdiagnoses individuals with potential depression. By responding to vague questions such as 'Morning is when I feel the best', 'I notice that I am losing weight', and 'I feel downhearted, blue and sad' with the choice of 'sometimes', individuals are thereby pre-diagnosed with potential depression. (https://secure.prozac.com/Main/zung.jsp) Psych central uses the Goldberg Inventory that is similarly broad, consumer-operated, and also tends to overdiagnose. 10 The DSM and other psychiatric texts and consumer manuals commonly suggest that undiagnosed depression will lead, eventually, to full-blown major depression. While a minority of individuals who suffer ongoing episodes of major depression will eventually suffer chronic major depression, it has not been found that minor depression will snowball into major depression or chronic major depression. This in fact, is one of the many suspicions among researchers that is referred to as fact in psychiatric literature and consumer manuals. A similar case in point is the suggestion that depression is a brain disorder, when in fact, research has not determined biochemistry or genetics to be the 'cause' of major depression. 11 Increasingly, Pharmaceutical sites are indistinguishable from consumer sites, as in the case of Bristol-Meyers Squibb's depression page, (http://www.livinglifebetter.com/src/htdo...) offering a layperson's depression definition and, immediately thereafter, information on its antidepressant Serzone. 12 Like the informational and State sites, these also link consumers to depression information (generally NIMH, FDA or APA research), as well as questionnaires. References American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1994. Cruikshank, Barbara. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization; A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1961. - - - . The Order of Things; An Archaeology of the Human Science., New York: Vintage, 1966. - - - . The History of Sexuality; An Introduction, Volume I. New York: Vintage, 1976. - - - . 'Technologies of the Self', Technologies of the Self; A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Amherst Press, 1988. 16-49. Funicello, Theresa. The Tyranny of Kindness; Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993. Hales, Dianne R. and Robert E. Hales. Caring For the Mind: The Comprehensive Guide to Mental Health. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. Healy, David. The Anti-Depressant Era. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac; A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self. New York: Viking, 1993. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self; Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. - - - . Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Office of the Surgeon General. Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. 1999. 〈 http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/me... 〉 Rose, Nickolas. Governing the Soul; The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge, 1990. Links http://www.drugstore.com http://psychcentral.com/library/depression_faq.htm http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/DSM-IV http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/depression.cfm http://www.livinglifebetter.com/src/htdocs/index.asp?keyword=depression_index http://my.webmd.com http://www.mentalhealth.com http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth/home.html http://www.prozac.com http://my.webmd.com/ http://www.a-silver-lining.org/BPNDepth/criteria_d.html#MDD http://psychcentral.com/depquiz.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Gardner, Paula. "The Perpetually Sick Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Gardner.html  & gt. Chicago Style Gardner, Paula, "The Perpetually Sick Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Gardner.html  & gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Gardner, Paula. (2002) The Perpetually Sick Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). 〈  http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Gardner.html  & gt ([your date of access]).

Abstract: In this essay we challenge whether current conceptions of optimism, hope, and resilience are complete enough to account for the complexity and nuance of developing and maintaining these in practice. For example, a quick perusal of popular outlets (e.g., Forbes, Harvard Business Review) reveals advice to managers urging them to “be optimistic,” or “be happy” so that these types of emotions or feelings can spread to the workplace. One even finds simple advice and steps to follow on how to foster these types of things in the workplace (McKee; Tjan). We argue that this common perspective focuses narrowly on individuals and does not account for the complexity of resilience. Consequently, it denies the role of context, culture, and interactions as ways people develop shared meaning and reality. To fill this gap in our understanding, we take a social constructionist perspective to understand resilience. In other words, we foreground communication as the primary building block to sharing meaning and creating our worlds. In so doing, we veer away from the traditional focus on the individual and instead emphasise the social and cultural elements that shape how meaning is shared by peoples in various contexts (Fairhurst, Considering Context). Drawing on a communication, discourse-centered perspective we explore hope and optimism as concepts commonly associated with resilience in a work context. At work, leaders play a vital role in communicating ways that foster resilience in the face of organisational issues and events (e.g., environmental crises, downsizing). Following this lead, discursive leadership offers a framework that positions leadership as co-created and as the management of meaning through framing (Fairhurst, Power of Framing). Thus, we propose that a discursive leadership orientation can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience that moves away from individual perspectives to an emphasis on the social. From a discursive perspective, leadership is defined as a process of meaning management; attribution given by followers or observers; process-focused rather than leader-focused; and as shifting and distributed among several organizational members (Fairhurst Power of Framing).  By switching from the individual focus and concentrating on social and cultural systems, discursive leadership is able to study concepts related to subjectivity, cultures, and identities as it relates to meaning.  Our aim is to offer leaders an alternative perspective on resilience at the individual and group level by explaining how a discursive orientation to leadership can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience. We argue that a social constructionist approach provides a perspective that can unravel the multiple layers that make up hope, optimism, and resilience. We begin with a peek into the social scientific perspective that is so commonplace in media and popular portrayals of these constructs. Then, we explain the social constructionist perspective that grounds our framework, drawing on discursive leadership. Next, we present an alternative model of resilience, one that takes resilience as communicatively constructed and socially created. We believe this more robust perspective can help individuals, groups, and cultures be more resilient in the face of challenges. Social Scientific Perspectives Hope, optimism, and resilience have widely been spoken in the same breath; thus, in what follows we review how each is treated in common portrayals. In addition, we discuss each to point to further implications of our model proposed in this essay. Traditionally taken as cognitive states, each construct is based in an individual or an entity (Youssef and Luthans) and thus minimises the social and cultural.  Hope Snyder, Irving, and Anderson define the construct of hope as “a positive motivational state that is based on an interactively derived sense of successful (1) agency (goal-directed energy) and (2) pathways (planning to meet goals)” (287). This cognitive set therefore is composed of the belief in the ability to create strategies toward a goal and the belief that those plans can be realised. Exploring hope can provide insight into how individuals deal with stress and more importantly how they use past experiences to produce effective routes toward goals (Brown Kirschman et al.). Mills-Scofield writing in Harvard Business Review mirrors this two-part hope structure and describes how to integrate hope into business strategy. Above all she emphasises that hope is based in fact, not fiction; the need to learn and apply from failures; and the need to focus on what is working instead of what is broken. These three points contribute to hope by reinforcing the strategies (pathways) and ability (agency) to accomplish a particular goal. This model of hope is widely held across social scientific and popular portrayals. This position, however, does not allow for exploring how forces of social interaction shape either how these pathways are created or how agency is developed in the first place. By contrast, a communication-centered approach like the one we propose foregrounds interaction and the various social forces necessary for hope to be fostered in the workplace. Optimism Optimism centers on how an individual processes the causality of an event (e.g., an organisational crisis). From this perspective, an employee facing significant conflict with his immediate supervisor, for example, may explain this threat as an opportunity to learn the importance of supervisor-subordinate relationships. This definition therefore explores how the individual interprets his/her world (Brown Kirschman et al.). According to Seligman et al. the ways in which one interprets events has its origins in several places: (1) genetics; (2) the environment in the form of modeling optimistic behaviours; (3) environment in forms of criticism; and (4) life experiences that teach personal mastery or helplessness (cited in Brown Kirschman et al.). Environmental sources function as a dialectical tension. On one hand the environment provides productive modeling for optimism behaviours, and on the other the environment, through criticism, produces the opposite. Both extremes illustrate the significance of cultural and societal factors as they contribute to optimism. Additionally, life experiences play a role in either mastery or helplessness. Again, interaction and social influences play a significant part in the development of optimism. Much like hope, due to the attention given to social and interactive forces, the concept of optimism requires a framework rooted in the social and cultural rather than the individual and cognitive. A significant drawback related to optimism (Brown Kirschman et al.) is the danger of unrelenting optimism and the possibility this has on producing unrealistic scenarios. Individuals, rather, should strive to acknowledge the facts (good or bad) of certain circumstances in order to learn how to properly manage automatic negative thoughts (Brown Kirschman et al.).  Tony Schwartz writing in Harvard Business Review argues that “realistic optimism” is more than putting on a happy face but instead is more about telling what is the most hopeful and empowering of a given situation (1).  Thus, a more interaction-based approach much like the model that we are proposing could help overcome some of optimism’s shortcomings. If the power of optimism is in the telling, then we need a model where the telling is front and center. Later, we propose such a model and method for helping leaders’ foster optimism in the workplace and in their communities. Resilience Resilience research offers several definitions and approaches in attempt to examine the phenomenon. Masten defines resilience as a “class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development” (228). Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker argue that resilience is “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (543). Interestingly, resilience and developmental researchers alike have positioned resilience as an individual consistently meeting the expectations of a given society or culture within a particular historical context. Broadly speaking, two central conditions apply toward resilience: (1) the presence of significant threat or adversity; and (2) the achievement of positive adaptation (Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker. Masten goes on to argue that resilience is however ordinary and naturally occurring. That is, the adaptive systems required during significant threat are already present in individuals and is not solely retained by a select few. Masten et al., argues that resilience does not come “from rare and special qualities, but from the operations of ordinary human systems in the biology and psychology of children, from the relationships in the family and community, and from schools, religions, cultures, and other aspects of societies” (129). Based on this, the emphasis of resilience should be within adaptive processes, such that are found in supportive relationships, emotion regulation, and environment engagement (Masten et al.), rather than on individuals. Of these varied interpretations of resilience, two research designs drive the academic literature— outcome- and process-based perspectives (Kolar). Those following an outcome-focused approach tend to concentrate on functionality and functional behaviour as key indicators of resilience (Kolar). Following this model, cognitive states such as composure, assurance, and confidence are examples of resilience. By contrast, a process-focused approach concentrates on the interplay of protective and risk factors as they influence the adaptive capacity of an individual (Kolar). This approach acknowledges that resilience is contextual and interactive, and is “a shared responsibility between individuals, their families, and the formal social system rather than as an individual burden (Kolar 425). This process-based approach toward resilience allows for greater inclusion of factors across individual, group, and societal levels (Kolar). The rigidity of outcome-based models and related constructs does not allow for such flexibility and therefore prevents exploring full accounts of resilience. A process-based approach allows for the inclusion of context throughout measures of resilience and acknowledges that interplay of risk and protective factors across the individual, social, and community level (Kolar). Bearing this in mind, what is needed are more complex models of resilience that account for a multiplicity of factors. An Alternate Framework: Social Construction of Reality Language is the tool storytellers use to generate interest and convey ideas. From a social constructionist standpoint, language is the primary mechanism in the construction of reality. Berger and Luckmann present language as a system that allows us to categorise subjective ideas, which over time accumulates into our “social stock of knowledge” (41). As our language creates the symbols that we use to make sense of the world around us, we add to our social knowledge thereby creating a shared vision of our own social reality. Because we accumulate varying levels and amounts of social knowledge, what we know of the world constantly changes.  For example, in organisations, our discourse and on-going interactions with each other serve to shape what we consider to be real in our day-to-day lives. In this view, subjective experiences of individuals are central to our understanding of various events (e.g., organizational change, crises, conflict) and the ways in which we cope with such occurrences (e.g., through hope, optimism, resilience). Alternative Models of Resilience We take Buzzanell’s framework as inspiration for an alternative model of resilience. Her communication-centric model is based in messages, d/Discourse, and narrative where communication is an emergent process involving the interplay of messages and interaction (Buzzanell). Furthermore, the communicative construction of resilience involves “a collaborative exchange that invites participation of family, workplace, community, and interorganizational network members” (Buzzanell 9). This alternative perspective of resilience explores human communication resilience processes as the focal point rather than examining the person or entity. This is essentially a design change, where the focus shifts from the individual or singular toward the communication processes that enable resilience. Essentially, according to Poole, “in process, we can see resilience as dynamic, integrated, unfolding over time and through events, evolving into patterns, and dependent on contingencies” (qtd. in Buzzanell 2). Buzzanell describes five processes included in the communicative construction of resilience: (1) crafting normalcy; (2) affirming identity anchors; (3) maintaining and using communication networks; (4) legitimising negative feelings while foregrounding productive action; and (5) putting alternative logics to work.  Here, we highlight two that most directly relate to the alternative model we propose. First, legitimising negative feelings while foregrounding productive action may sound like repression, but in fact it emphasises that negative feelings (nonproductive emotions) are real and that focusing on positive action enables success while facing significant threat. Furthermore, as a communicative construction, this process includes reframing of a situation both linguistically and metaphorically. This communicative process address a major drawback related to the optimism construct presented by Brown Kirschman and colleagues regarding the potential danger of unrelenting optimism. Similarly, putting alternative logics to work, in its practical application, creates resilient systems through (re)framing. Through (re)framing, individuals, groups, and communities can create their own logics that enable them to reintegrate when facing adverse experiences. That is, (re)framing provides an opportunity to endure unfavorable situations while creating communicatively creating conditions that enable adaptation. This idea can also be seen in popular press such as in the Harvard Business Review blog “Craft a Narrative to Instill Optimism” (Baldoni). According to Baldoni, leaders have a choice in creating the narrative of our world. Thus, leaders serve as the primary meaning managers in the workplace. Leadership and the Management of Meaning Kelly begins our discussion toward an ongoing discursive turn in leadership research. Much like hope, optimism, and resilience, Kelly proposes that leadership has been wrongly categorised and therefore has been inadequately observed. That is, due to focusing on trait-based leadership models espoused by leadership psychology the area of leadership has been left with significant deficits surrounding the very core of leadership. The lessons learned about the reductionist treatment of leadership can be applied to our understanding of resilience. Thus, we draw on discursive leadership because it provides an example for how leaders can foster resilience in various settings. The discursive turn stems from the incongruity seen in these traditional trait or style-based leadership approaches. From a social constructionist perspective, researchers are able to explore the forms in which leadership contributes to the meaning construction process, much in the same way that a communication perspective, outlined above, emphasises resilience as a process. This ontological shift in leadership research not only re-categorises leadership but also changes the ways in which leadership is studied. Kelly’s emphasis on a socially constructed view of leadership combined with alternative methodological approaches contributes to our aim to explore how a discursive leadership orientation can contribute to communicative construction of resilience. Discursive Leadership Discursive leadership views leadership as more of an art rather than a science, one that is contested and inventive (Fairhurst, Discursive Leadership). Where leadership psychology emphasises the individual and cognitive, discursive leadership highlights the cultural and the communicative (Fairhurst, Discursive Leadership). Leadership psychology is analogous to common, social scientific understandings of resilience that typically confines resilience into something easily attainable by individuals. The traditional leadership psychology literature attempts to determine causality among the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural elements of leader actors, whereas, discursive leadership takes discourse as the object of study to view how we think, see, and attribute leadership. Discursive leadership offers an optimal resource to view the communicative practices involved in the management of meaning and communicative construction of reality, including resilient systems and processes. Thus, we draw everything together now, and introduce practical interventions organisations can implement to foster hope, optimism, and resilience. An Alternate Model in Practice Attention to human capabilities and adaptive systems that promote healthy development and functioning have the potential to inform policy and programs that foster competence and human capital and aim to improve the health of communities and nations while also preventing problems (Masten 235). Masten’s words point to the tremendous potential of resilience. Thus, we wish to conclude with the implications of our perspective for individuals, groups, and communities. In what follows we briefly explain framing, and end with two interventions leaders can use to help foster resilience in the workplace. A common and practical example of language creating reality is framing. Fairhurst, in her book The Power of Framing explores framing as a leader’s ability to construct the reality of a subject or situation. A frame is simply defined as a mental picture where framing is the process of communicating this picture to others. Although words or language cannot alter any physical conditions, they may, however, influence our perceptions of them. Fairhurst goes on to “frame” leadership as co-created and not necessarily found in specific concrete acts. That is, leadership emerges when leader actors are deemed to have performed or demonstrated leadership by themselves and/or others. Leadership in this case is determined by attribution. For Fairhurst, leaders are able to shape and co-create meaning and reality by influencing the here and now.   From this perspective interventions should be designed around the idea of creating alternative logics (Buzzanell) by emphasizing the elements of framing. For the sake of brevity, we wish to emphasise two fundamental areas surrounding process-oriented and communicative constructed resilience. It is our hope that leaders may use these takeaways and build upon them as they reflect how to position resilience at the individual and organisational level. First, interventions should focus on identifying the supportive adaptive systems at the individual, group, and societal level (e.g., family, work teams, community coalitions). This could be done through a series of dialogue sessions with an aim of challenging participants to not only identify systems but to also reflect upon how these systems contribute toward resilience. These could be duplicated in work settings and community settings (e.g., community forums and the like). Second, to emphasise framing, interventions should involve meaningful dialogue to help identify the particular conditions within a significant threat that will (a) lead to productive action and (b) enable individuals, groups, and communities to endure. Overall, an increased emphasis should be placed on helping participants understand how they are able to metaphorically and linguistically (Buzzanell) create the conditions surrounding adverse events. Our aim in this essay was to present an alternate model of various human processes that help people cope and bounce back from troubling times or events. Toward this end, we argued that media and popular portrayals of constructs such as hope, optimism, and resilience lack the complexity to account for how these can be put into practice. To fill this gap, we hope our communication-based model of resilience, with its emphasis on interaction will provide leaders and community members a method for engaging people in the process of coping and communicating resilience. Honoring the processual nature of these ideas is one step toward bettering individuals, groups, and communities. References Baldoni, John. “Craft a Narrative to Instill Optimism.” Harvard Business Review 17 Dec. 2009: 1. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books, 1966. Brown Kirschman, Keri J., Rebecca J. Johnson., Jade A. Bender., and Michael C. Roberts. “Positive Psychology for Children and Adolescents: Development, Prevention, and Promotion.” Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Eds. Shane J. Lopez and Charles R. Snyder. New York: Oxford. 2009. 133-148. Buzzanell, Patrice M. “Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies into Being.” Journal of Communication 60 (2010): 1-14. Fairhurst, Gail T. The Power of Framing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. ———. “Considering Context in Discursive Leadership Research.” Human Relations 62.11 (2009): 1607-1633. ———. Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2007. Kelly, Simon. “Leadership: A Categorical Mistake?” Human Relations 61.6 (2008): 763 – 82. Kolar, Katarina. “Resilience: Revisiting the Concept and Its Utility for Social Research.” International Journal of Mental Health Addiction 9 (2011): 421033. Luthar, Suniya S., Dante Cicchetti., and Bronwyn Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-562. Masten, Ann S. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56.3 (2001): 227-238. Masten, Ann S., J.J. Cutuli, Janette E. Herbers, Marie-Gabriel J. Reed. “Resilience in Development.” Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Eds. Shane J. Lopez and Charles R. Snyder. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 117-132. McKee, Annie. “Doing the Hard Work of Hope.” HBR Blog Network Oct. 2008: 1-2. Mills-Scofield, Deborah. “Hope Is a Strategy (Well, Sort Of).” Harvard Business Review 9 Oct. 2012: 1-2. Poole, Marshall S. “On the Study of Process in Communication Research.” Montreal, Quebec, Canada. May 2008. Fellows address at the International Communication Association annual meeting. Postman, Neil. Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Schwartz, Tony. “Fueling Positive Emotions in a World Gone Mad.” Harvard Business Review 2 Nov. 2010: 1-2 Seligman, Martin E., et al.  The Optimist Child. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Snyder, Charles R., et al. “Hope and Health: Measuring the Will and the Ways.” Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology: The Health Perspective. Eds. Charles R. Snyder and Donelson R. Forsyth. Elmsford: Pergamon, 1991. 285-305. Tjan, Anthony K. “Lead with Optimism.” HBR Blog Network May 2010: 1-2. Youssef, Carolyn M., and Luthans, Fred. “Positive Organizational Behavior in the Workplace: The Impact of Hope, Optimism, and Resilience.” Journal of Management 33.5 (2007): 774-800. 

Abstract: Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threa tened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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